Unclassified
Published on December 5, 2024
It is now a certainty: all Breton homes will be connected to fiber at the latest by the end of 2026. This is in any case what the president of the Mégalis union in charge of deployment, Loïg Chesnais-Girard and the general director of this union, Patrick Malfait in a press conference: “we are now certain of having finished at the end of 2026”. And they insist on the fact that it is indeed “100%” of residents who will be connected “and not 95%”. This certainty obviously applies to the network managed by the community and not to areas which are served privately. Meeting this deadline is even more of a feat as the technicians also had to erase the consequences of storm Ciaran.
This announcement comes as Mégalis is preparing to cross the milestone of 800,000 sockets installed in a few days, a figure ahead of the schedule which predicted on this date the milestone of 700,000 sockets for a total of 1,450,000 taken. It is a titanic project which began in the 2010s with some delays. Initially, the objective was to fiberize the region by 2030, then an acceleration was given when Loïg Chesnais-Girard took over as president to target 2026. Initially, the project was entrusted to several companies, which generated considerable delays, which were borne by sectors such as Ploërmel or Pontivy. A new strategy was then applied: entrust the entire project to a single company. From 2021, the curve in the number of sockets installed has soared and the pace continues to accelerate. “We install 25 to 30,000 sockets per month for an investment of 25 to 30 million per month. It’s the equivalent of a large college per month…”, calculates Loïg Chesnais-Girard.
In total, the deployment of fiber in Brittany represents an investment of 1.7 billion euros, “the largest public investment in Brittany”. The fiber network will be owned by the Brittany region, therefore by the Bretons, and then leased to the operators. In the long term this will allow a return on investment…
These are obviously prospects that will leave doubtful those who are impatient to see fiber arrive in their homes. This is the case of the OBC territory which is among the last on the list. If you are in this case, know that it takes a year of study to list all the addresses and prepare the site and a year of work… If you go to the interactive map of Mégalis and your municipality is marked “in progress study”, you will know that you will be part of the last tranche.
Mégalis technicians must face extraordinary difficulties in Brittany such as serving the islands which will also be fully fiberized in 2026. For some, the passage of submarine cables is impossible and in this case it is aerial that the fiber will arrive.
Compliance with the schedule is all the more important as the operator Orange has announced that it will abandon copper by this time. The process is already underway, but the deployment of fiber also takes this constraint into account. At the same time, the marketing rate is also increasing. It now reaches 50% of the network with 360,000 customers. The 4 main operators (Orange, SFR, Free, Bouygues) are present in Brittany.
